Transforming Psychiatry into Data-Driven Medicine with Digital Measurement Tools

Overview

Journal NPJ Digit Med

Specialty Medical Informatics

Date 2019 Jul 16

PMID 31304319

Citations 34

Authors

Honor Hsin

Menachem Fromer

Bret Peterson

Collin Walter

Mathias Fleck

Andrew Campbell

Paul Varghese

Robert Califf

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Psychiatry has been limited by historically rooted practices centered primarily on subjective observation. Fields such as oncology have progressed toward data-driven clinical decision-making that combines subjective clinical assessment of symptoms and preferences with biological measures such as genetics, biomarkers, imaging, and integrative physiology to derive quantitative risk scores and decision support. In contrast, psychiatry has just begun to scratch the surface of measurement-based care with validated clinical questionnaires. An opportunity exists to improve modern psychiatric care with novel data streams from digital sensors combined with clinical observation and subjective self-report. The prospect of integrating this complex information with modern computational and analytical methods could advance the field, both in research and clinical practice. Here we discuss this possibility and propose some key priorities to enable these innovations toward improving clinical outcomes in the future.

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